We continued our interview with the writer for the series and asked him about the most challenging aspect of being an artist in today’s world. Wayne shared with us: “Taking the leap and putting yourself out there can be really challenging when there are so many talented people out there doing exactly what you want to be doing. It’s easy to get wrapped up in thoughts of ‘is this good enough’ and ‘nobody is going to like this’ and just end up not posting anything. Getting past that anxiety and learning to love your own work is a constant battle, but it’s something that the positive feedback we see from people goes a long way toward helping.”
When asked about the recurring themes in the comic, the co-author of the series revealed: “While neither of us is particularly religious, we’ve always been really interested in the debate on creation vs evolution. We took the concept of creationism as if everything happened for a misguided reason or by accident. God in our comic is something of a lovable goofball, because sometimes it feels like that’s what it would have taken to create something like the platypus.”
We also learned which contemporary artists inspire the creators of ‘Cactusface Comics’: “We’re both big fans of Fran Sundblad (Tiff & Eve), Neil Kohney (The Other End), and Chè Crawford (The Immortal Think Tank). But honestly there are so many great artists out there who we look up to. It’s humbling to be part of a community of creators where we could endlessly gush about how much we love any given one of them.”
Finally, Wayne told us what seems to be the most rewarding aspect of creating comics and sharing them with their online audience: “It’s so much fun to see people react to our comics, building on them to make their own jokes and memes. We also post some facts alongside all of our comics when we post them on Reddit, and it’s always neat to see people who learned something because of what we posted.”
